Hardly a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, Jesuit Patrick Healy made history

It reads like an impossible tale only Hollywood could
spin.A boy born into slavery becomes
the president of a predominantly white university a mere eight years after
Lincoln’s assassination.While most were
unaware of Father Patrick Healy’s background at the time, that’s exactly what
happened.

It was not uncommon, even in the early 1800s of the
deep-south, for a slave owner to fall in love with a female slave, occasionally
going so far as to enter into a common-law marriage with her. Michael Healy, an Irish-American plantation
owner in Georgia, did just that. After
purchasing Mary Eliza as a slave, he fell in love with her, entered into a
common-law marriage, and fathered seven children. The law of the land at the time, Partus sequitur ventrem,
dictated that a child’s slave status followed the bloodline of the mother, not
the father. All children of Michael
Healy and Mary Eliza were therefore legally slaves in the state of Georgia.

On February 27, 1830, Mary Eliza gave birth to her
third son, Patrick Healy. Like his
siblings, Patrick was a legal slave and forbidden to attend school. While his father couldn’t change the law, he could
send his children north to seek the education and opportunities he desired for
them. And so Patrick headed to New York
at a young age, an Irish Catholic with African-American roots. It was actually his religious denomination, and
not his bi-racial heritage, that met some resistance at the Quaker school he
attended. Though far away, Patrick’s
father kept in close contact with his children and soon learned of a new Jesuit
College opening in Worcester, Massachusetts, the College of the Holy Cross,
which offered a high school curriculum as well.

Patrick transferred to Holy Cross, where he
graduated in 1850. He entered the Jesuit
order and spent two years training in Frederick, Maryland, then teaching at St.
Joseph’s College in Philadelphia and at Holy Cross. It wasn’t long before tensions over slavery began
tearing at the seams of the country.
More and more, Patrick’s mixed race became the subject of contention,
and he welcomed the opportunity to study abroad when the Jesuits sent him to
Europe for further education. There he
made history for the first time.
Attending the University of Leuven in Belgium, he earned his doctorate
degree, becoming the first American of mixed African ancestry to do so, and
certainly the first born to a slave woman.

Patrick remained in Europe during the height of the
civil war and was ordained a priest in 1864.
He spent a year on retreat in France before returning home to the states
in 1866. Though slavery was now
officially abolished, the movement’s hero, President Abraham Lincoln, was dead. As the country struggled to rebuild and
reunite, Father Healy began teaching Philosophy at Georgetown University. While many were indeed aware of his
African-American lineage, his lighter skin kept many others from ever suspecting. He was able to excel on his merits. In 1868, he became dean of the college and
vice president the following year. In
1873, he was elevated to the university’s highest honor; president. The ink on the thirteenth amendment to the
constitution was hardly dry, and Lincoln’s death was still on the lips of a
rattled a nation when this slave woman’s child became president of a mostly white
university.

Father Healy’s impact on Georgetown was so
momentous, he was often called the school’s “second founder”. He took control of major building projects
with an eye for Gothic architecture that he learned while studying in Belgium. The most prominent was Healy Hall, opened in
1881 and used to this day. He also upgraded
the curriculum, preparing it for the twentieth century, adding courses in
chemistry and physics and expanding the schools of law and medicine.

When
he left his post in 1882, he was one of the most renowned Jesuits of his time
and a respected leader in the circles of Washington, D.C. He became advisors to three U.S. presidents
and finished his career as spiritual director back at St. Joseph’s College in
Philadelphia. In 1908, he returned to
live at the Georgetown infirmary where he died in 1910 just shy of his 80th
birthday. The slave-born Jesuit who advanced
to a successful university president just eight years after Lincoln’s
assassination, was buried and remains today in the campus Jesuit cemetery.

May 27, 2020 - Now more than ever, we invoke God to wipe away the darkness of anxiety, allowing us to be guided by the light of Christ and to trust in God’s promise of new life. Over the last few months, our Jesuit provinces have been in a place we don’t often find ourselves, a place that saw our schools closed, parishes empty, and the halls of our retreat centers giving new meaning to the word “silent.”

May 12, 2020 - Susan Baber has been named the Associate Provincial Assistant for Secondary Education for the new USA East Jesuit Province. The new province will come into being on July 31, Susan will assume this new role in August.